emptybill: > Go look up "sphota" and "shabda brahman". Shabda is > more than the perishable sounds of human speech... > According to the Indian mythology 'mantra' is the 'primary sound of the universe', called 'Shabd' in Sanskrit. In the Rig Veda Shabd is personified as 'Vac', the first primal sound percieved as human speech.
According to the Indian tantric theory the devas and bodhisatvas do not take kindly to being addressed by their real names, which are seldom known by ordinary people. So, some yogi fakirs of old thought they knew the Gods well enough that they could even call the gods by nicknames! Calling upon the gods with their real names is very offensive to the Gods, according to some fakirs, and confusing to the people who cannot understand nonsense gibberish. Apparently, some uninformed dillatante types once overheard some of these so-called 'secret' names being chanted in Buddhist hybrid-Sanskrit at a drum-bangin' yoga camp-meet, amd mistook these for the real first names of the Gods. This, in itself is a strange tale, as it implies a hierarchy of those who pretend to know the secret names, those who 'wanna know the names', and those who do not know any nick-names, except ones they read in a paperback book. If bija mantras were to be used to address the Gods in secret or public ritual praise, Sage Patanjali would have said so in the 195 aphorisms, would he not? Or, if any bija mantras were known to be used back then, the historical Buddha would have mentioned them, right? Now for the historical facts: The bija mantras were first invented by the so-called 'Eighty-four Mahasiddhas' specificaly as meaningless sounds to be focusing on for yoga meditation practice, according to Naropa and sGampopa. Read more: 'The Jewel Ornament of Liberation' sGam.po.pa (Author), Herbert V. Guenther (Translator) Shambhala, 2001 'Masters of Mahamudra' Songs and Histories of the Eighty-Four Buddhist Siddhas By Keith Dowman State University of New York, 1986
